Building Renovations Will Yield More Space

June 30, 1999|By Tom Scott. Special to the Tribune.

FOX RIVER GROVE — A committee that has spent six months researching ways to ease a space crunch in Fox River Grove Elementary School District 3 has recommended a $4 million building plan tied to hopes that a state grant will pay for part of it.

Leaders of the group, who presented their recommendations to the District 3 School Board on Monday, chose the building project after reviewing a number of optional plans to resolve the district's space needs. They ranged from adding more mobile classrooms at a cost of $100,000 to building a new school for $6 million.

Pat Hughes, a subcommittee chair, said the junior high addition and the elementary renovations were favored in surveys of teachers, parents and community members.

The addition at the junior high would create up to eight new classrooms and a two-court gym, and the cafeteria would be relocated to the existing gym space.

Hughes said a key feature of the group's recommendation involves the relocation of the district's three 5th-grade sections to the expanded junior high school, where they would be housed with 6th, 7th and 8th graders.

This also relieves classroom requirements at the Algonquin Road School, Hughes said, and it avoids doing two construction projects at the same time.

Hughes said the district also would be able to move its administration office, now located in a home on Gladys Avenue, back to the Algonquin Road School and phase out the use of four mobile classrooms there.

The committee recommended that the district hold a $3.7 million to $4 million bond referendum to finance the building program.

Supt. Ron Davis, who headed the group's subcommittee on funding, said the goal would be to keep the property tax rate level by refinancing a bond issue that will be retired in 2003. The tax rate would stay the same for the life of the new bond issue, Davis said.

The tax scenario would change dramatically if the district won a grant through the new Illinois FIRST program, which could reimburse the district up to 60 percent of the project's cost.

Davis said the district wouldn't be eligible for the grant until after a referendum was passed, but he believes the district would have a good chance of receiving it. First, sections of the junior high school are functionally 100 years old, Davis said, and second, the state considers 14 percent of the district's 669 students to be unhoused based on a formula that factors in the amount of school space per student.

"We stand a good chance of getting some of the grant funds that are available," Davis said, though he added it's not guaranteed. If district voters were to approve a referendum, which would be held next spring at the earliest, the district would get the grant sometime in mid-2001, Davis noted.

Board member Don Rose, who chaired the committee, said the group's goal was to seek an option that will take care of the district's space needs for the next 20 years.

Rose said the committee is planning at least three community meetings over the next four to six weeks to present its recommendations.